Oimai Algeiou

This release from the Swedish black metal band Algaion was kind of a cult for many of us back in the day and even after all these years, still remains in the heart and tastes of many veterans like myself. I think there's one and only trouble with this record: the drum machine! I work with programmed electronic drums since the very beginning of my career, and I can date it around 1999: nowadays, it is a feature integrated in many Digital Audio Workstations, and it's a lot easier to create various and dynamic drum patterns, while in the past, when you had a stand-alone hardware on its own, everything was a little bit harder.

The number of acoustic drum samples is very huge by now, and the quality is almost comparable with a real drum set. Even the modern computing capacity is able to emulate a real recording environment, with echoes and sound-bleeds from a sampled percussion to the virtual set of microphones. Algorithms of humanization are able to put more or less slightly out of grid the beats, and even the "tuning" of the sampled percussion could vary depending on how the beat is supposed to sound like! Human drummers are still the best option, in my opinion, but technology, along with a good skill in writing interesting drum patterns, could represent a valid alternative when it is not possible to do otherwise.

But we are speaking about a release originally published in 1995, and by a band at its beginning: melodic, razor sharp tremolo-picked riffs, repeated many and several times within a song, plus a wonderfully executed screaming vocals' technique, very sorrowful and high-pitched, credible and serious in its effort to scare or deflect the mood of the listener! Track list is a mixture of mid -lasting tracks and long, but repetitive and under-structured, extended ones, from, let's say, 7 minutes to even 12 minutes long.

The trance like searched effect is reached effectively and with full force, so prepare yourself for a journey through a disturbing black metal monotonous landscape, where minimalistic, but well written, melodies lead the excursion of the listener. But, well, drum machine fake, mechanical sound, it's hard to be considered acceptable: no dynamic, as every beat sounds the same, and the samples used are very far in resembling a real drum kit. And, even worse, the patterns are so simple, so poorly written, that you can simply lose interest in the drums lines after a short while. It is black metal, it has to be simple and monotonous, but here things are a little out of control.

Given a long blast-beat section, or a mid-tempo with a 16th notes double kick drum filling in the background, the sound is so electronic and with little to no variations at all, that there's a very huge risk of boredom, within a matter of a few consecutive tracks. I think that this album deserves for sure its cult status, but it would be a lot better with a completely different approach to the drum machine likes: there's not always the need to have a real skilled drummer in order to craft a good rhythmic section, but some sort of skills or recording care are still very important!